Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

by Thomas Pletzinger

  The SoHo Grand is on West Broadway and Canal Street, and if there was ever dust here, then the dust has been wiped away, because I can see Lua and myself in the windowpanes as we step out of the taxi. With suit and credit card and leather leash, we don’t stand out here. I take the book out of the plastic bag and leave the bag at the cloakroom. I order a martini and ask for it to be brought to an armchair by the window. It’s twilight, Lua gets water and falls asleep, I call “646-299-1036 Kiki Kaufman!” and ask whether she wants to meet again. Sure, she’ll come by, she says, she’s in the neighborhood. Down on the street a vendor is pushing home his hot dog stand, he looks like the security guard from the library. I put my new white sneakers on the armchair opposite me and open to Chapter “William Wordsworth vs. Robby Naish”. The not beautiful but unusual Carrie is becoming an actress on Broadway, and Hurstwood is pouring drinks once again. So I get a refill too, outside the taxis and the rickshaws pass by. Carrie must look like Tuuli, not beautiful in the strict sense, but nonetheless the most beautiful. Hurstwood is sitting in a theater and watching her. I’m lying in the armchair by the window and reading, I’m observing Carrie and hearing Tuuli singing. In my head Tuuli is sitting on my roof in Brooklyn and singing, Felix and I are listening to her, we’re so moved that we can’t move and so in love that we can’t speak, we drink silently, we lean our heads on the chimney and listen to each other breathing. I can’t think and can’t speak and can’t even read in peace, all stories right now are Tuuli’s and Felix’s and mine. Of course these stories have to be told, I think, but who in them sings what and when, who can look how beautiful, who stands on whose stage and sings and stirs emotions, who speaks when and what can be said, I’d like to determine all that myself, I think, and I close the book and wait for Kiki Kaufman, the woman with the camera.

  As I accept a glass of wine, Kiki Kaufman sits down in the armchair next to me and crosses her legs. Again she’s wearing a plain black dress and black shoes, and is carrying a black bag, she has an empty glass in her hand and puts it down on the book. Could she have a sip of my wine? she asks, and takes one. She snaps a photo over her shoulder without looking and puts her camera on the table. Of course, I say, and Kiki Kaufman holds the wine up to the light. You look tired, Svensson, she says, isn’t that right, aren’t you tired? I know, I say. From a long period of time, she says, people remember the first day best. She pours my red wine in her white wine glass. Who are you actually? she asks, but I remember

  how Lua came in first through the crack of the door, tilted his heavy head and climbed on the sofa like an old man; I remember how the door opened all the way and Felix said, fucking shit, Svensson! I remember how Felix took two bottles of Rolling Rock out of the bag and put the rest in the fridge. Beer makes you schmart, he said, in the corner of the apartment the television was on, “oh my God, oh my God” again and again, then the camera shook and the image blurred, again and again, like a mantra. Felix sat down next to me and watched, Lua lay down in front of the fridge and begged. Felix gave me the beer, we refrained from clinking bottles,

  but at this point Kiki raises her glass and interrupts me. So it’s that story, she says, for weeks I’ve been taking pictures of this city, pictures of this tragedy in many chapters. My 9/11 story isn’t about this city, I say, not about that day and not about terrorism and colonialism and symbols and consequences. My story, I say to Kiki Kaufman, is about Tuuli and Felix and me:

  Tuuli and Felix were staying in a hotel next to the World Trade Center, they were visiting New York for a few weeks and planned to return to Germany in mid-September. Felix’s father was paying, Tuuli was seven months pregnant. We weren’t alone, we were three, but on the tenth of September, of all days, Felix and I had talked the night away in a bar in Brooklyn, at first full of panic and later full of pride. Felix had slept on my sofa, Tuuli had stayed alone in her hotel. In the morning I’d gone to work as always. I remind myself and Kiki Kaufman that all I’d had to drink after the World Trade Center collapsed that morning was beer, and that it was already early evening when I arrived at my apartment in Williamsburg. The sun was shining somewhat more orange and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway behind the house roaring more softly than usual, but with more sirens. Felix and I sat on the sofa and stared at the television. I must have called the hotel a hundred times, said Felix. His voice was a bit too high. At first the lines were jammed, and then no one picked up, not even the receptionist. Felix drank without looking up from the television, stiff as a pole he sat on his side of the sofa, he moved only to lift his beer bottle. I knew that he was thinking about Tuuli, I’d been thinking about her nonstop for hours, the question of Tuuli had already been in the room with me long before Lua and Felix arrived and it was waiting for someone to actually ask it. But Felix didn’t.

  Our wine glasses are refilled. Kiki reaches for her camera and takes a picture of me and the dog and herself in the mirror behind us. I drink to that, for days I’ve been drinking milk and vodka and champagne, and I tell Kiki that Felix too went to the fridge again and twisted the caps off two more beer bottles. Felix had always claimed to be a photographer himself, sometimes he’d managed to sell one of his earlier pictures, but in early September he’d had no luck and instead always had a beer in his hand. We had enough to do with Tuuli and the child and the uncertainty. What uncertainty? asks Kiki with wide eyes. I lift my glass and start again from the top. I explain that

  the fall of the towers was visible from the window that morning in the office of the literary agency where I worked, down on the street dust-covered pedestrians on the way uptown and fire-truck sirens on the way downtown. I’d been the first in the office on the thirteenth floor overlooking Third Avenue. In the hallway Jackson and Ismael from the mailroom were praying, there was no television, the radio played solemn instrumental music. We read Italian and German Web sites, we unscrewed the air conditioners from the window frames. We suspected biological and chemical agents in the airplanes and tried to seal the windows with double-sided tape in order to survive. I tried to reach Tuuli in the hotel. Nothing. When I called Felix in my apartment, the line was also constantly busy. Then the phone lines died. Raffaella sat in front of the fridge and cried hysterically, Mark worked out with a pocket calculator how long our oxygen would last. We believed there had been a complete closure of all bridges and tunnels out of Manhattan. I wrote Tuuli and Felix a farewell e-mail, but I couldn’t send it because all the lines were overloaded. After half an hour a German publisher was standing in the doorway and offering us dried apricots from his hotel downtown. He was unharmed, we would survive. On the street people streamed northward, away from the smoke and dust. I walked directly toward the towers to find Tuuli. Eventually I was stopped by a policeman: Evacuation! I headed west and tried again and again, it was Tuuli, please, they had to understand, but they shouted at me: Go uptown! End of discussion! Eventually I turned around and walked toward Brooklyn. Between LaGuardia and JFK the sky was blue and empty, all airplanes were grounded, people cringed when pigeons fluttered over their heads, on the way to the bridge ramp on Fifty-ninth Street, among the hushed pedestrians on Second Avenue, later on the Queensboro Bridge over the dirty East River, as the smoke turned from white to black. In front of me two men were walking without shoes, their shoulders covered in snow-white dust, the younger one said, this is what Exodus must have been like, and the older one said, bullshit, this is like Genesis 3, verse 24, so he drove out the man and settled him east of the Garden of Eden. A thin, black woman asked for a cigarette, she heard the bridge was going to be blown up, she said, she quit smoking years ago, but “if I go down, I’m going down smoking,” but I didn’t have any cigarettes,

  and on this cue Kiki Kaufman reaches into her bag. Those are the pictures that everyone knows, she says, and that she already photographed off a television in Chicago, in a salad bar on the Magnificent Mile. That afternoon she threw her things in the car and drove to New York. Since then I’ve been a camera, says Kiki Kaufman, elegantly rolling
the tobacco in the paper, in front of the SoHo Grand smoking is still permitted, but that will probably change soon. Can she offer me one, she asks, but I say that I actually smoke only in exceptional situations, but she can roll me one. I collect cigarettes, it’s hard to explain. Yes, says Kiki, this world is hard to explain. She rolls the cigarette, then hands it to me, and I repeat that

  I walked all the way from the office back to Brooklyn, through Queens, then on the Pulaski Bridge, in Greenpoint and later through Williamsburg, past the shards and garbage bags by the river, through the smell of yeast dough from the Polish bakery on Manhattan Avenue. In front of Enid’s the old Poles from the building were standing on the street and holding cans of beer in their hands. I tried calling Tuuli or Felix from a pay phone. Nothing. I didn’t get through. Maybe Felix was searching for her, maybe he’d found her. What a fucked-up mess, said one of the Poles, and gave me a Pabst Blue Ribbon, he said, Joseph Barach, Bialystok, and because I didn’t know how else to respond, I said my name and where I was from. Germany? asked Joseph Barach. He crushed his Pabst can and immediately opened another. Fuck, he said, four in the afternoon and I’m standing with a German in the middle of Manhattan Avenue and drinking beer? An old Polack like me! No way I would have done that yesterday, kiddo! What else should we have said? The Poles held out the beer cans to me like earthenware jugs in the Bohemian Hall, they looked down the street and across the river, the plume of smoke was turning in our direction, I waited awhile longer in front of Enid’s, no police car forbade the drinking on the sidewalk, more and more people were standing around and drinking, but neither Felix nor Tuuli showed up. Around five the sun shone lower, around six we could smell the smoke, and Joseph Barach lifted his beer the way other people drop an anchor. The world and its beer brands are going downhill, he said. That whole warm September day all I had to drink was beer with the old men in front of Enid’s, and then I at least sat with Felix and Rolling Rock on my sofa on Lorimer Street in Brooklyn and we waited together for Tuuli, for word from her. Around seven, I went to the fridge and gave Lua a cold cheeseburger to eat.

  Lua likes cheeseburgers, says Kiki, she knew that already. Yesterday she had been photographing the half-naked bakers in front of their ovens before she found me and Lua, that direct rawness, that perceptible heat, the belly of the city. Lua and I seemed to her like the image of the amputated country. That’s a different subject, I reply, but I still haven’t gotten to my own, I’ll stick to it, it’s still about

  Tuuli, seven months pregnant and still not there. We didn’t know where she was, we were too anxious to talk nonsense. On the answering machine, there were twelve messages from Germany, we couldn’t call back, we wanted to keep the phone line free for Tuuli. Felix, Lua, and I sat around and watched the airplanes on television, the fire, the running people, the dust clouds, the updates, eyewitness reports and amateur videos, the we-will-hunt-them-down-and-punish-those-responsible loop. When there was a knock at the door, we gave a start. In the doorway stood Tuuli, in jeans and a bright purple PricewaterhouseCoopers promotional T-shirt that was actually much too large. She’d rolled up her pants legs, the T-shirt stretched over her belly. She looked like she was in disguise, her pregnant belly seemed, like the clothes, not to belong to her body. In her hand she was holding Felix’s huge leather suitcase. I’m sorry, she said, looking around the room. The light on the unwashed windowpanes was dark orange, almost red. In the morning she’d been standing on the roof terrace and observing the burning of the towers as if paralyzed, then the first one came down. The hotel was evacuated, she’d had to put on a gas mask. She’d gone down the stairs and out of the building, by boat to New Jersey, and came here over the bridges to the north. She hadn’t been able to reach us. She was sorry. In the suitcase there was only a bathrobe. Felix fell back on the sofa, he let out air like an inflatable animal from which the plug has been pulled. Your pants are too big, he said weakly, the T-shirt color looks fantastic on you. I turned down the television, Mayor Giuliani at a press conference, they were now certain that there was no poison gas on board and that there were no biological agents. In the factories of New Jersey, Tuuli whispered, they wear clothes like these, then Felix put a hand on her dust-covered cheek. It’s all right, he said, we were worried about you. There’s still chocolate ice cream in the fridge, I said. Felix opened two more beers and we watched Tuuli as she very intently and carefully spooned the whole cup of ice cream. Here we were and we couldn’t get away, no trains were leaving, no buses were running, no airplane was permitted to take off, all the bridges were closed. We expected the worst and had no idea what the worst could be, but

  Kiki interrupts me at this point. I can imagine the light, she says, setting her glass on the knee-high table, not the worst. She wakes Lua and positions his head on the arm of my chair, she takes a picture of the two of us through her wine glass. You guys are drunk again, says Lua, and I’m glad he’s finally breaking his silence, because he’s been too quiet today, and Kiki Kaufman with the camera doesn’t object when I gesture for more wine, when I decline to taste and approve, when the waiters in light of my story and the camera finally replace Kiki’s white wine glass with a larger one. She presses the shutter release and raises her filled glass first to me, then to the window and toward the sky, as if she were saying thanks for the invitation. She nods as if she were joining Tuuli and Felix and me, as if she were climbing with her camera out the window and up the fire escape to us and sitting down with us on the edge of the roof, as if she were watching

  as Tuuli wiped the dust off the lens of her camera with her sleeve. We were sitting on the roof over Lorimer Street. The answering machine in the apartment clicked on, Lua howled with the sirens. Felix and I took turns climbing down to get more beer. The lines were jammed, we couldn’t use the phone. Tuuli stared for a long time at a blank billboard over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which obstructed the view of the place where that morning the towers had still stood. She looked mellower now than she had at the kitchen table. Felix was talking about the smoke cloud, how strangely beautiful and aflame it was in the sunset, and Tuuli’s tears smeared the ash on her face. Felix sat down next to her on the edge of the roof and said, your tears are smudging. He leaned toward her for a kiss. In one hand he was holding a beer can, the other was placed on the fine blonde hair on the back of Tuuli’s neck. I kneeled down between the two of them, took the camera, and Felix lifted his beer into the picture at the right moment and asked

  Can you look right over here? Kiki stops me, and I hold my glass up to her camera eye. Please don’t interrupt me, I say, cameras don’t talk. I’m drunk, I hold on to Lua’s collar, I put down the wine, and Kiki photographs herself and me and Lua in the dark window and West Broadway in the rain on the other side. I remember

  the sky like a soap bubble over the roof of 37 Lorimer Street, the sun behind the smoke and the billboard, the pale searchlights over lower Manhattan, familiar from operating rooms and film sets. I remember Felix and Tuuli sitting next to each other on the edge of the roof and more and more ambulances on the BQE. How Tuuli began to roll a joint for us, how she watched her fingers as she did so, how she sang softly to herself, how Felix and I listened to ourselves breathing, how Tuuli’s song mingled with the singing of the Latino regulars in front of Oscar’s corner store below, how Felix stood up after a while and claimed that Colombians were used to things like this: Colombians sang all the time, they had civil war and blown-up airplanes every day, they didn’t even notice days like today anymore, that was a good solution. Anyway, said Felix, did we know that Bryan Adams and Keanu Reeves always shared a hotel room when they were in New York, at the Mark Hotel on Seventy-seventh Street and Madison Avenue.

  Are they fucking? Kiki Kaufman laughs, and Lua is sleeping with a heavy head on his remaining front paw, he knows Felix’s and my stories, he knows my questions and Felix’s answers,

  they’re fucking, said Felix, yup. Couldn’t Bryan Adams be Keanu Reeves’s father? It didn’t matter, the
two of them were fucking. We laughed and clinked our beers, Tuuli sat on the edge of the roof and watched the ambulances on their way to Manhattan. People were jumping out, she said, a little boy next to me on the roof saw people falling onto the plaza, he asked, “Why are the birds burning, Mom?” Probably, said Tuuli, jumping is faster than burning, probably when it comes to dying, speed matters. She was done with the joint, Felix lit it and smoked between index finger and thumb, as if we were soldiers on watch, as if we had to conceal the burning tip, as if weapons were pointed at us, as if we were being observed, no open containers, no animals, no weapons. Then he leaned his head back and exhaled. Jumping is always better than burning or drowning, said Felix, he’d once fallen out a window himself, dislocated his shoulder and broken his tailbone, had he ever told us about that before? He’d told us, but when one of us is talking, the others can be silent, so we didn’t interrupt him. Felix sat down on the edge of the roof, smoked and talked to himself. Down in the apartment the answering machine was recording messages again, someone wanted to know whether we were still alive. We lay on the roof as if in the beyond and listened to the voices from the other side of the world. We didn’t answer, we couldn’t move. Tuuli held her belly as if she had pains. I touched the back of her sweaty neck, her neck hairs were sticky. I thought you were dead, I said, and Tuuli bent over the edge. What are you guys talking about, she asked, and her voice sounded faded like the voices on the answering machine. Maybe that had to do with the fact that, a few seconds later, she puked very softly off the roof. Tuuli stood up and spat, we’re done for, that was it, she said. I could have wiped the dust off Tuuli’s face, given her clothes that fit her, declined the next beer and filled up Lua’s bowl maybe, I could have offered her my toothbrush and my bed, myself too. I should have told her to get some sleep, tomorrow this world would definitely look different. But I waited too long. Nothing better occurs to you? Lua asked me. Tonight your words mean the exact same thing as your silence, he said. Felix brought a guitar up, he played something by Johnny Cash and pissed off the roof at the same time. In front of Corner Store Oscar’s corner store the Colombians were drinking and singing their laments on Skillman Avenue, aah, more beer for the angels of Lorimer Street, said Corner Store Oscar, with his half-shot-off lower jaw, people are drinking today like there’s no tomorrow. On the store’s steps one of the Colombians was drumming on plastic paint buckets, the guy in the Argentinian soccer jersey was banging two beer bottles together, a Cuban regular was playing ukulele, Corner Store Oscar was shaking his keys. He was out of Rolling Rock, Budweiser, Coors Light. A six-pack of Pabst, I said, and Lua next to me ordered the same. Maybe so Corner Store Oscar wouldn’t have to go for the beer twice, because in summer it’s very warm even at night in New York. We and the beer brands are going downhill, said Lua, and when I returned to the roof, Tuuli looked up from Felix’s mouth. We’re not alone, she lied, we’re three. I turned around and climbed back down to give word of our survival. The lines were finally free again.